Biblical Witness to the "End of Ice"

Biblical Witness to the "End of Ice"

Rev. Douglas Olds

July 9, 2019 (revised October 1, 2019, January 2021)
all rights reserved

Dahr Jamail's The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption (2019) proposes a vision of the Earth nearing its ecological end.  He gives a firsthand report how ice, frost, and cold are disappearing as a result of runaway global heating from a combustion economy. Without situating these theologically, he accounts how the Earth's ecosystems that support human civilizations are nearing culimination and destruction manifested by the “end of ice.”  

The Anthropocene era’s defining features--its positive feedback loops that are heating the earth-- are disrupting the frost cycle. These feedbacks manifest the confluence of Anthropocene decadence: economic idolatry; global heating; evasion of responsibility not just to the Creator but even to basic contingencies and adaptation to environmental limits; and the seeking of personal agency that evades every moral scheme of accountability. The anthropogenic disruption of the cryosphere seems the keystone indicator of culpable society’s direct challenge to the prerogatives of God—that direct humanity to ecological trusteeship and soothe swelter and heat primarily afflicting God’s favored, the agricultural workers addressed by many of Jesus’ parables. 

The Book of Job locates with God the power and prerogative to give ice:

Job 38:29 From whose womb did the ice come forth,

    and who has given birth to the hoarfrost of heaven? (Implied: NO ONE BUT GOD)

Elihu in Job 37.10:

By the breath of God ice is given, and the broad waters are frozen fast. 

Also:  Psalm 147:16-17 He gives snow like wool;

          he scatters frost like ashes. He hurls down hail like crumbs— 

  who can stand before his cold? 

Cold is likened to faith for the servant of Israel's God:

Proverbs 25:13 Like the cold of snow in the time of harvest

    are faithful messengers to those who send them;

    they refresh the spirit of their masters.

Cold immobilizes agricultural pests, and heat invigorates them:

Nahum 3:17 Your guards are like grasshoppers,

    your scribes like swarms of locusts

    settling on the fences

    on a cold day—

    when the sun rises, they fly away;

    no one knows where they have gone.

And heat comes after human treachery to wither foes away,; the virtue of of loyalty is like the melting of ice:

Job 6: 14 Those who withhold kindness from a friend

    forsake the fear of the Almighty.

    15 My companions are treacherous like a torrent-bed,

    like freshets that pass away,

    16 that run dark with ice,

    turbid with melting snow.

    17 In time of heat they disappear;

    when it is hot, they vanish from their place.

Job likens the death of the treacherous like heat that steals away the snow:

   24.19Drought and heat snatch away the snow waters; 

    so does Sheol those who have sinned. 

Snow follows God’s vanquishing the violent:

Psalm 68:11 The Lord gives the command;

          great is the company of those who bore the tidings

12 “The kings of the armies, they flee, they flee!”

     The women at home divide the spoil,

13       though they stay among the sheepfolds —

     the wings of a dove covered with silver,

          its pinions with green gold.

14 When the Almighty scattered kings there,

          snow fell on Zalmon.

Heat is associated with God’s anger and coming judgment: 

  Isa. 30.27 See, the name of the LORD comes from far away, 

  burning with his anger, and in thick rising smoke;

.

Heat--and the lack of cold, frost, and ice--is also associated with God's future day of judgment:

Zechariah 14 See, a day is coming for the LORD, when the plunder taken from you will be divided in your midst. 2 For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle, and the city shall be taken and the houses looted and the women raped; half the city shall go into exile, but the rest of the people shall not be cut off from the city. 3 Then the LORD will go forth and fight against those nations as when he fights on a day of battle. 4 On that day his feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives, which lies before Jerusalem on the east; and the Mount of Olives shall be split in two from east to west by a very wide valley; so that one half of the Mount shall withdraw northward, and the other half southward. 5 And you shall flee by the valley of the LORD’s mountain, for the valley between the mountains shall reach to Azal; and you shall flee as you fled from the earthquake in the days of King Uzziah of Judah. Then the LORD my God will come, and all the holy ones with him.

6 On that day there shall not be either cold or frost. 7 And there shall be continuous day (it is known to the LORD), not day and not night, for at evening time there shall be light.

(Cf. The heat of combustion signals judgment in Isa. 33.11-12)

Humanity might ritualize lament to address God’s judgment and power over destiny in a way that recognizes individual grief while celebrating the dawn of God’s new age.  For those who lack the anticipatory confidence of faith, despair from the current crisis of Climate Disruption and Injustice is rational.  For those of faith who wonder at God’s seeming absence from the current crisis, we may alternatively continue in confidence that even if human extinction plays out, that will not be humanity’s or God’s final word.  Our actions and virtues during collapse will partly determine our individual destiny inside God’s eternal being.  Even if it becomes apparent that all is lost, God-pleasing faith actualizes in continued good works and confidence in God’s loving power. Allegiance to justice will be tested and virtue refined in the crucible of an increasingly fevered planet. (Jer. 17:7-8). The pursuit and embodiment of goodness knows no expiration.